Two news items about alternative operating system news in a row? What is this, Christmas? In any case, the Haiku project, the darling of OSNews (hey it's okay now), has released its second alpha release. This new stable development release contains some serious improvements over the first alpha.

Did you ever consider the problem might be you and your approach to Haiku?

Boot times if more than 15 seconds for Haiku suggests something is very wrong with YOUR setup. My system boots in less than 10 seconds off a hard-drive and less than 5 seconds off a SSD.
There are two working development systems available, what have you tried?

USB drives work fine for me. 2GB and 8GB models.
FAT partitions are R/W for me.
My Atheros chipset has been working since the start of February.
WPA encryption I have no need for.

Did you ever consider the problem might be you and your approach to Haiku?

Surely. Until now, I've mainly been arguing about why Haiku is going to give new users some headaches before they get used to it (if one tells them that *they* are to blame because they can't adapt themselves to the computer, they'll just laugh and get out), and discussing some design decisions from my exterior Linux user point of view. This is important, at least if Haiku wants to attract some new users someday (and they'll probably find them in the Linux crowd first). And when you're deep into an OS, it becomes harder to see some flaws, which you see more easily at first look. Hence my "first look" comments.

Now, for everyday use testing, I need to quit Linux thinking and go into Haiku thinking, which noticeably needs using it as my main OS (instead of under vbox emulation) for some time. I've hence described which requirements Haiku must meet before I use it in such a way. I am aware that some requirements are already met.

Boot times if more than 15 seconds for Haiku suggests something is very wrong with YOUR setup. My system boots in less than 10 seconds off a hard-drive and less than 5 seconds off a SSD.
There are two working development systems available, what have you tried?

I tried Alpha 2, but don't search too far : as I've explained before, the issue is that I'm using Virtualbox. I don't know if VT/AMD-V brings near-native performance as advertised, but without that you get sluggish performance as long as you don't have guest additions installed. I need to get out of Virtualbox for performance testing and everyday use, it's just useful for having a general look at the UI and stress-testing app behavior (especially under high CPU load).

USB drives work fine for me. 2GB and 8GB models.
FAT partitions are R/W for me.
My Atheros chipset has been working since the start of February.
WPA encryption I have no need for.

Thanks for that information ! Didn't know that the Haiku already went so far ^^
I just had some doubts about USB pens, because some posts ago someone say that it was not working for him.

Now, for what's left...
-> Beta-quality : I wait for Haiku devs to be sufficiently confident on their OS to call it a Beta before installing it on a real machine. I don't want to get my HDD killed because of some random driver/partition handling issue, and from the post above it looks like even the boot process is not perfectly stable yet, so I should better wait a bit.
-> WPA : Yes, I really need that. I won't switch my router to WEP simply because of Haiku. WEP is outdated encryption technology that you can probably crack with a simple smartphone now (as long as aircrack has been ported on it), no one should be using it in 2010.
-> OS Dev environment : Don't know much about development on haiku. Is there a way to build a custom ELF toolchain ? A port of mtools or some other command line tool for FAT image file handling ? A way to execute some variant of script shell (don't care about the syntax, just need something that can execute common commands and is as easy to edit as modify) ? Has bochs or a similar x86_64 emulator been ported to Haiku ?